Lily's Italian Bistro in downtown Gastonia closing

Jerry Simonetti launched a new restaurant in downtown Gastonia in 2015 with an eye for repeating his prior success running high-end eateries in Long Island, New York.

Lily’s Italian Bistro seemed to find a niche for a while at 141 W. Main Ave. But its owner said a falloff of support and other unique challenges of sustaining a business in downtown Gastonia will lead him to close the venue for good on Saturday.

In November, Simonetti will blaze a new trail by opening Lily’s Bistro at 4547 Charlotte Highway in Lake Wylie, South Carolina, switching from Italian to more of a Mediterranean food focus. He believes it can be successful in a burgeoning area that has been more kind to new growth in recent years. But he said he’ll do so with a heavy heart.

“There’s nothing worse than closing a restaurant,” he said Thursday morning. “There’s nothing worse than losing one of your children, basically."

Strong start fizzles

Simonetti hung up his restaurant hat and came to this area a number of years ago to help look after his late parents when they relocated from New York to Lincolnton. By 2009, he decided to launch Simonetti’s Pizza in Belmont, and watched it quickly gain a loyal following. But it didn’t allow him to serve some of the more upscale Italian dishes he had specialized in.

With partner and longtime friend George Cangiano, he signed a 10-year lease in June 2015 on Main Avenue in Gastonia and opened Lily’s, naming it after his first grandchild, with an eye for providing a whole different quality of food. It seemed to have finally broken a bad hex in a storefront where more than a half dozen restaurants and bars had opened and closed in the past decade.

But though things started well, business had dropped off in the past year. Simonetti said he can’t put a finger on it, as he has seen few negative reviews online and on social media that might indicate a real problem.

Almost three months ago, he made the decision to open for brunch on Sundays, at a time when the state’s new Brunch Bill opened the door to earlier Sunday alcohol sales. But the offering never took off, and Simonetti announced last week he was closing the restaurant again on Sundays and Mondays.

“There just was not enough business across the board,” he said. “For whatever reason, our Fridays used to be very strong, and now they’re not.”

Shelter proximity hurt

Simonetti said he and his chef, Lizz Giacomucci, recently parted ways, and other family dynamics helped finalize his decision to close. He also believes a few other factors contributed to the lack of business. For example, he found himself constantly having to refute rumors that Lily’s had gone out of business or was going to close for the past year, even when he had no plans to do so.

He also said the presence of the Salvation Army shelter being just three blocks away on Main Avenue created ongoing obstacles to running a successful restaurant. He saw his outdoor patio as being one of the nicest features of Lily’s. But even on nice days and evenings, patrons seldom wanted to sit outside because homeless people would approach them and request money or ask for food from their plates, he said.

Other transient visitors would enter the restaurant and cause some type of disruption, and Simonetti said he had to deal with occasional property damage outside, or evidence that someone had used the bathroom on his patio after hours.

“It’s no way to run a business,” he said. “You can’t have a decent restaurant and have to deal with that on a daily basis.”

Simonetti said his Belmont pizza shop will remain open, and he’ll also continue selling his line of Addley’s Bagels from the Belmont General Store downtown. He also plans to provide new jobs for his Gastonia staff, and hopes to sublease the space on Main Avenue to some type of new restaurant.

But his upscale restaurant eye will turn to Lake Wylie.

“I would like to have stayed in Gastonia and would love to keep them both,” he said. “I’m just stretched a little thin.”

You can reach Michael Barrett at 704-869-1826 or on Twitter @GazetteMike.